The aim of this study is to analyse and compare environmental and employee disclosure by Spanish Ibex35 and German Dax30 companies. For this purpose we construct a disclosure index through the content analysis of disclosures in annual reports and other corporate social responsibility reports. This research concludes with the existence of a noticeable coincidence on employee disclosure in both countries, unlike environmental disclosure, where German companies show a higher disclosure index.

Business ethics as a component of the corporate social responsibility, should be promoted from the Board of Directors. In this sense, the drawing up of a code of ethics would imply the formal statement of corporate principles which affect the responsibility with employees, shareholders, customers, the environment and every aspect of the society. Previous empirical evidence has emphasized the contradictory effect between the ownership of shares by directors and its effect on the shareholders’ economic interests, and a low concern with ethics issues by independent directors.
In this line, this paper aims at establishing the effect of these two features of the Board of Directors on the incorporation of a ethical code for non-financial quoted Spanish companies. The finding show that the Board ownership leads to a entrenchment in the top management, by generating a divergence between owners’ and managers’ ethical interests. Faced with this situation, the presence of independent directors becomes necessary to reduce such conflicts.

This paper presents an empirical study of the degree to which audit reports provide information relevant to the evaluation of the companies’ commercial risk. To this end, an experimental study has been conducted based on a survey of 74 commercial risk analysts employed in Spanish companies. The results indicate that the type of audit report (unqualified or qualified) does have an influence on commercial decisions taken by risk analysts. In particular, there are differences between an unqualified and qualified audit report if we analyze the following decisions: when commercial risk analysts decide to begin commercial relationships with another company, when they evaluate the risk of the commercial operation, when they demand additional guarantees beyond the normal, and when they must decide the amount of commercial credit to grant to the possible client. On the contrary, the results have shown that the nature of the qualifications relatively affects to these decisions.

The fiscal situation of the local governments is the result of several political and economic circumstances. Thus, socioeconomic factors (population and economic level, among others) are not enough to explain public sector behaviour, but the political structure also plays an outstanding role. In this line of research, theoretical and empirical literature has investigated the impact of the political system, conflicts between decision-makers within governments and ideological differences on governments’ financial management. Using this approach, in this work we evaluate the long- term evolution of the expenditures, taxes and budgetary deficit/surplus in Spain, showing the impact of the ideology and the political strength in the municipal finances. Also, and following the existent literature, we also consider the economic level and population as relevant socioeconomic variables. We conclude that the municipal financial management does not depend on the political (left/right) sign or the government’s political strength, while the economic level and the population influence positively in the total of expenditures and taxes. Finally, the budgetary deficit/surplus is independent of our explanatory variables.

The increasing adoption of international accounting standards and global convergence of accounting regulations is frequently heralded as serving to reduce diversity in financial reporting practice. In a process said to be driven in large part by the interests of international business and global financial markets, one might expect the greatest degree of convergence to be found amongst the world’s largest multinational financial corporations. This paper challenges such claims and presumptions. Its content analysis of longitudinal data for the period 2000-2006 reveals substantial, on going diversity in the market risk disclosure practices, both numerical and narrative, of the world’s top-25 banks. The significance of such findings is reinforced by the sheer scale of the banking sector’s risk exposures that have been subsequently revealed in the current global financial crisis. The variations in disclosure practices documented in the paper apply both across and within national boundaries, leading to a firm conclusion that, at least in terms of market risk reporting, progress towards international harmonisation remains rather more apparent than real.